Tips for Shooting Tennis

Tennis is a great game to show action and emotion. But because of the speed it’s played at it can often be hard to transfer the excitement to your images. If you follow these tips you might get some good results.

Choose the maximum aperture on your camera and make sure the ISO setting will let you set the shutter speed to about 1/800th of a second so you can freeze the action.

Try and pre-focus and lock onto the player that’s serving. It’s important that the camera doesn’t try to re-focus during the serve or the background will probably be sharp while the player will be blurry.

If you know the game slightly and can anticipate the action it’ll help as you can then shoot when the player starts to swing. If the ball’s in the frame before taking your photo, there’s a good chance it’ll be gone when the image is captured. Just focus on one player as it’s basically impossible to get both of them in the frame and get a good result.

Experiment a bit and add some variety to the photos by setting the aperture down to around f/22 and then change the ISO setting to 100. If you do this and slow the shutter to about 1/15th of a second it can create some good motion blur.

Focus on the player’s faces sometimes some wonderful reaction and emotion shots. These could be celebration, anger, disappointment, etc.